Mailing List History

The way most people keep up to date on network news is through
subscription to a number of mail reflectors (also known as mail
exploders). Mail reflectors are special electronic mailboxes which,
when they receive a message, resend it to a list of other mailboxes.
This in effect creates a discussion group on a particular topic.

Who invented mailing lists? Early forms of mailing lists were invented almost
as soon as email was invented.
It quickly became apparent that by combining several email
addresses together into a single address, one email could be easily
sent to a group of people in one action.

The first mailing lists carried on
the ARPANET were based on the first
email program SNDMSG.
Some of the early and most popular mailing lists included the following:

human-nets. Human
factors and their relation to networks.

network-hackers. Internet programming and protocol issues.

sf-lovers. Science fiction literature.

wine-tasters. Wine tasting.

Google Groups has some interesting
historical logs of SF-lovers, human-nets, and other ARPANET
mailing
lists from the early 1980's. In fact, it was these lists that
inspired Jim Ellis and Tom
Truscott to develop the Usenet to provide
similar functionality for organizations that weren't connected to the ARPANET.

A version of mailing lists was also created on the BITNET
network to enable thousands of researchers in organizations around the world
to exchange information. BITNET also
copied
most of their
mailing
lists to
the Usenet newsgroups.

For many years there have been three mailing list software applications that
run most mailing lists (see more information at the linked pages):

Listserv history. Originally conceived by Ira
Fuchs and Dan Oberst and implemented by Ricky Hernandez to support BITNET lists.
Revised version developed in 1986 by Eric
Thomas.

Listproc history. Listproc was originally developed for
Unix computers by Anastasios Kotsikonas ("Tasos") at Boston University in the
1980's. It became very successful, and is now supported by the Corporation for
Research and Educational Networking (CREN).

Historical applications. There have been many other types
of mailing list management software developed over the years,
including those listed below: